


C Team Call of Cthulhu: The Founder Melteth in Vain

by sleepy_underscore_gary



Category: Acquisitions Inc., Call of Cthulhu (Roleplaying Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:53:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23722669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepy_underscore_gary/pseuds/sleepy_underscore_gary
Summary: Following the events of the CoC miniseries, the team is called on to investigate another mysterious death. Who is the stranger accused of the crime, and can our heroes stay true to themselves in the face of fear? Beloved characters and lore details will be ruined, and you know it will be a good episode because Ryan isn't here.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	C Team Call of Cthulhu: The Founder Melteth in Vain

The windblown crowd entering her swinging doors was not a usual one for The Nest, and Rose felt sure she was being called on in her newly minted capacity as de facto sheriff rather than saloon keeper. Their silent faces were tensed with that mixture of worry and anger that had become all too familiar since the mysteries had started, and the leaders’ boots struck with agitated purpose as they approached the bar.

“Rose,” said Bill Hansen, the barrel-chested man standing at the head of the group. Willow stepped out from the gloomy back storeroom to stand beside Rose protectively.

“What is it, Bill?” Rose sighed, continuing to wipe the bar. “We ain’t got time for another panic about Indian witchcraft or migrant food ruining the children. We’re still cleaning up the pieces of whatever happened with those tongues and Bleeker.”

He glowered at her tone, but came back more forcefully, “We got a murderer.” He stepped aside to show his two large twin sons holding a slumped figure between them.

The young man looked up with sunken tired eyes and a bruised face, blood dripping from his lip onto a burlap shirt. Rose recognized him to be a newcomer who had passed through on and off over the last year. He looked withered and sickly on his best days, and she remembered a specific occasion when he got drunk as hell at The Nest and had to be thrown out. Now it seemed he did most of his drinking on the street.

While Rose was considering, Willow cut in, “How d’you know, Bill? You seen him do it?”

Bill’s eyes hardened. “If we seen him do it, he’d already be dead.” The weaselly man beside him was twisting and untwisting a thick rope in his hands as if itching to put it to use.

“He done it!” cried Anne Simmons, a plump woman in a light blue bonnet. Her face was red and streaked with tears as she pushed away from the ladies comforting her. “He was always leering at my little Katie. I knew it would come to no good, but I never thought…. And now she all torn apart-” She collapsed into a fit of sobs as the women hugged her shoulders.

“Torn apart?” said Rose. Her heart went cold as her mind flashed back to sensations beyond its ability to process: the sound of a thousand severed tongues flapping against the ground, the unearthly light of a sucking abyss streaming from an agonized jawless maw.

“Torn apart,” nodded Bill, face giving way from anger to fear. “Just like the cattle.”

“And he was always coming and going,” spoke up another rancher from the crowd. “Right around them dying. Can never say where he was.”

“And now he moved on to people!” yelled another voice.

“Now, hold up, hold up,” said Willow, her palms lifted. “Slow down, everybody. We can’t just blame the first stranger we see for whatever’s gone wrong.”

Rose turned to the pitiful slumped man, “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I… my mind… sometimes I can’t remember,” he stammered blearily.

“Drunk!” yelled Anne from her sobbing. “Good for nothing sinner! Monster!”

Rose closed her eyes and felt herself being pulled apart, yet through the cracks showed just an empty sadness. “I…” she started. “Let’s… Just don’t do anything yet. Let us keep him in the jail for just a bit, try to get to the bottom of this.”

Bill’s face had hardened again. “We came here to give all due deference to you and your friends being the law and whatnot now.” He leaned closer. “But if you don’t take care of this by tomorrow, then we will.” An angry murmur passed through the crowd in agreement.

*********

“You sure you want to see this?” asked the undertaker. “It ain’t pretty.”

Rose saw Willow glance at her nervously, but Bluehand remained as unreadable as ever in his grey-blue pigment. She took a deep breath and said, “Yes.”

They were standing in a cold basement room around a sheet covering a vaguely human shape. A single gas lamp hanging above cast shadows on several plain coffins standing upright along one wall while a row of surgical tools glinted unpleasantly on a table nearby.

The undertaker pulled back the sheet, and each of them recoiled at the gruesome sight.

“Looks like some wild animal attacked,” said Bluehand, leaning closer to examine the body. “Wolves?”

Willow shook her head. “Could be. But they don’t leave much behind after eating their fill.” She seemed to be jotting notes on a wrinkled paper pad, although Rose couldn’t imagine where the girl had learned to write.

“It’s true,” said the undertaker. “Although you can see from the wounds,” he pointed, “There are rips like bites, but the jaws look, well, big, and that’s mixed with these clean cuts like blades. Certainly not something I’ve seen before, but that’s been happening more and more often lately.”

“There are some things man should never see,” said Bluehand with dusky eyes staring off into some far distant scene. “You don’t know the world until you’ve seen a boy tousled into oblivion…”

“And the Smith girl said the attacker looked like a person, at least of a sort,” the undertaker added helpfully.

“What?” Willow looked up. “If someone saw then why are we wasting time here? We have to talk with them.”

Rose believed in her own luck and tenacity more than any god, but she spared a moment for the girl lying on the stark planks, or what had been the girl, now just an empty, bloody doll. Perhaps she expected some peace in that silence; instead, she just found Bleeker’s distorted dying screams ringing in her ears.

They soon sat in the main room of a modest cabin staring at a girl of four or five and her worried-looking parents.

“Go on, Nellie,” said her mother. “Tell ‘em what you saw.”

The child retreated further into her chair, looking shyly at the ground.

“She was getting some water like a good girl that night…” her mother prompted.

Rose held out her hand to Nellie. “It’s okay, darling. Whatever you can tell us,” she said.

“Some… some scary thing,” said the girl. “Like a mean doggy… But tall...” Her little face was squeezing with growing panic.

“Was it that man?” asked Willow, looking up from her pad intently, but Nellie retreated into frightened silence once more.

“Here, hon,” said Rose, taking the charcoal and a sheet from Willow. “Draw what he looked like, then we won’t ask any more.”

It seemed to last forever, each ponderous, clumsy stroke scratched onto the paper by a shaky little hand, but finally, they all stared down at the finished form.

It was the boogeyman hiding in every child’s closet but multiplied as if double-exposed or shifted in space, a dark looming shape with two spiky heads and too many crooked arms. But impossibly in the negative space behind lurked something worse, indefinable, yet somehow reaching off the page into their little town. Quickly, Rose tossed the paper into the fire where it flared and curled into ash. No one objected, but as they glanced at one another she wondered if their minds echoed with the same terrible five-pronged afterimage.

*********

“The ringing… Please…” moaned the wanderer as they entered the office that housed the two small jail cells of the town. He was curled on his side in one corner of the cell, body shaking violently in the fading evening light.

“What’s that now?” said Rose.

He turned toward them, and Rose could see that sweat was pouring down his face. “Help…” he said through clenched teeth. “Just make it stop.” He pointed a shaking hand at a coat rack in the corner, and Bluehand moved to investigate.

Rose indeed noticed something ringing now, almost imperceptible, but enough to set her teeth on edge and make her shoulders tense. It grew as Bluehand returned carrying a worn leather satchel.

“What is it?” asked Willow.

“I believe it’s Bleeker’s bag,” said Bluehand. “All his effects were brought here.” He reached into the satchel and held up a tuning fork that vibrated with a continuous piercing tone in the darkening, dusty office.

But the young man in the cell seemed to have almost forgotten the noise he had been so set on before. He stared at Bluehand transfixed with one arm shielding his eyes as if from the noonday sun. 

“What are you?” he said fearfully. “You real? Or like the giant weaving spider… The skull whispering ‘ _Peine de mort_ …’” He glanced around the shadows of his cell.

“Argyria; it’s a condition-“ Bluehand said as he approached the bars, but the man screamed and tried to back away further.

“Stay back, stay back, demon!” he trembled. “Inside you… How?” He started shaking with even greater force.

“Bluehand, I’m sorry,” said Rose, turning to him as he backed away. “Maybe you should take the fork and step outside, just to calm him down.”

“Now,” Rose said, returning to the young man in the cell. He did seem less agitated but continued to sweat and tremble. “Who are you? What did you do? I don’t know how long until they come back asking for your head.”

“I…” said the man. “I’m Trevor.” And he told a tale of moving from town to town, of somehow always ending up hated, somehow on the outside.

Willow was looking at the floor. “I know what it’s like,” she said gently. “I’ve been in your shoes.” 

“And now the hunger,” Trevor continued without acknowledging. “The blood… I know it ain’t right, but whiskey is the only way to make them stop. Even now…” he pressed a hand onto his eyes but quickly opened them again to watch the shadows.

“What happened that night?” Rose said, impatient to know about the attack but trying to remain kind.

“That night?” said Trevor with a stare more focused than she had yet seen from him. He sighed. “When you got nobody, it’s easy to fall in with the wrong crowd. Thought they were just typical roustabouts, but then things started getting strange. There was all this talk of symbols and pacts, and they didn’t just want a gold watch from anyone they came across on a dark night but their blood. I didn’t like it, but then that’s how you wake up to find yourself stuck to a stone in the desert, no ropes, but it’s like your limbs can’t move. And they were all around, hoods and robes and chanting, but as soon as they cut me all these terrible and old things rose up and ate the stars, and the whole world flooded red and…” he paused. “I still dream of it. I dreamed of it the night the girl died.”

The silence that followed was broken when Bluehand reentered flanked by Bill, his twins, and Anne, their faces grim.

“It’s time,” said Bill. Rose saw that the sky had grown dark while they talked.

Willow stood with her arms spread in front of the cell. “Now just wait,” she said. “We’re still figuring it out, but it sounds like someone else did this to him. He maybe wasn’t in control, some madness.”

“Even worse!” said Anne. “Who knows what he’ll do again? We have to be protected.”

Bill nodded unhappily. “She’s right,” he said. “They’re waiting outside the courthouse. Where’s the key?”

Willow turned to Trevor. “Tell them,” she pleaded. “Come on, they’re angry, but we can help you.”

The young man’s eyes darted wildly around the people in the room. The wind howled, and a shaft of moonlight through the small barred window of the cell lit him from behind. “I… I…” he stammered. His eyes rested on Bluehand, still holding the whining tuning fork. He screamed and before their eyes began to change.

Every muscle contracted as he curled tightly, then his head snapped back and the shadows filling the cell pulled and stretched his splayed limbs as if on a rack. His arms lengthened and then split with a sickening crunch, wicked claws extending from both new ends. The crunching continued as his spine grew, black hair covered his body, and he began to tower over the onlookers. His jaws extended into a snout filled with bristling fangs, but they hung apart more like a serpent than a beast. They kept spreading and spreading beyond physicality as his head turned and split so that all that remained were two enormous vertical jaws with rows of teeth receding into a lightless, gasping throat. Rose stared into Trevor’s fearful eyes as they slowly filled with darkness and all sign of his soul was extinguished into red marbles.

All the onlookers were frozen but jumped back as the beast began to ram wildly into the bars of the cell door. Bill raised his revolver.

“It will hold!” yelled Willow.

A thundering crack filled the small room as Bill shot, but Trevor continued to clash into the door unabated. Bill stared at his gun in disbelief, then continued unloading into the monster, the repeated shots adding to the cacophony of growls, the clanging door, and the maddening hum of the tuning fork piercing through it all.

“You damned fool!” shouted Rose. “Don’t you know anything about werewolves? It’s gotta be silver!”

The lock was starting to buckle; just one or two more charges would do it.

Bluehand spoke quietly. “Run,” he said. “Run!” he yelled.

They tumbled through the door into the dark street as a loud metallic crunch came from behind and a shape leaped over them. The monster turned and stalked toward the group. One of the twins ran. Anne whimpered.

Then, saint-like, Bluehand stepped forward with his arms spread. “ _Decus_ ,” he intoned. “ _et tutamen_.”

The monster halted. It growled and started toward them but faltered and stepped back. Holding a claw in front of its eyes, it sank into the darkness.

“No! We can’t let him get away!” yelled Willow.

“But we can’t fight it!” said Anne. “You saw that thing; it was ready to tear us apart!”

Rose closed her eyes and tried to shut out the world to think. After a time, her eyes popped open. “Anne and Bill, warn people to stay inside, then you do the same. The three of us will get any silver we can, then try to chase it before it hurts anyone else.”

When they held the items they managed to get together, it didn’t look like much: three silver dollars, a slim necklace of Willow’s, and a hunting knife inherited from Bluehand’s father with an ornamental silver grip. They didn’t know what the tuning fork was made from, but they included it in the pile because it had seemed to affect Trevor before his transformation.

Willow bent down near the place where they had faced the beast and examined the marks left in the dirt road. She paced forward set on the track, and in the thin light of Rose’s shutter lantern, it almost looked like she had transformed into a hound following a scent. No one spoke as they followed the trail, sometimes halting, sometimes backtracking, but inexorably leaving town for the wilderness beyond. Hours passed. Dark mountains loomed in the distance, and with each step, the wind and the whine of the tuning fork grew.

Willow held up her hand as they neared a valley of sandstone hoodoos. “Somethin’ tells me he’s close,” she whispered.

Bluehand stared up at the stone pillars. “What do we do?” he said.

Willow shrugged, “When have we ever had a plan?”

“Okay,” said Rose. “Bluehand, you have some power over it, so you stay back. We’ll try to draw it out, then you swoop in and kill it. If you can’t get a clean stab, you can at least use the tuning fork to drive it away from us for another try.”

Despite her single-mindedness on the trail, Willow now looked troubled. “I just…” she said. “I can tell there’s still good in him. Isn’t there a chance there’s another way?”

Rose put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know, hon,” Rose said. “I don’t know if we can take that chance. Bluehand?” She turned to him.

“I see nothing left of the boy,” he said after some consideration. “I’m sorry, Willow, we have to strike if we can. But maybe you’re right.”

“I am right,” said Willow softly.

The two women crept into the entrance of the canyons as Bluehand melted into the eerie darkness. The hoodoos loomed like strange totems, moonlight shadows doubling their shapes into a claustrophobic hall of mirrors. Turning each corner, Rose would startle at some new projection, then calm as stone came into focus.

“Willow,” Rose whispered, but turning behind she saw no sign of the girl, only darkness. “Willow! Willow!” she whispered more loudly as she retraced several turns, fearing that raising her voice more would attract the beast. “Argh, never split the party,” she hissed to herself.

A distant voice cracked the stillness. “Willow!” Rose now yelled. The sound echoed off the hoodoos in every direction. A distorted growl followed. “Willow! No, no, no….” She had brought the girl to her death. But what could she do in this maze?

She looked back and forth at the disorienting moonlit shapes, searching desperately for anything she could grasp, and noticed a small shadow that stood out solidly from all the rest. It was her own. She closed her eyes, breathed deep, and she became that shadow. The darkness was no less chaotic, no less dangerous, but now she was a part of it. There were the echoing growls, there Digby’s dying breath, there the slurp of severed tongues and the crowd’s accusations and cracking bones and gunshots and there, standing out, was the steady vibration of the hated tuning fork. She went towards it with hands outstretched but eyes closed, letting the sound and darkness guide her.

She opened her eyes and there was Bluehand crouched beside a pillar.

“This is… not ideal,” he said.

He gestured toward the opening beyond. There, in a roughly circular space stood Willow and beast-Trevor in an apparent standoff, lit by the pale moon.

“You can fight it!” Willow’s voice carried on the wind but came through clearly. “Come on, Trevor, I know you can. Whatever they did to you, it doesn’t mean that’s all you can be! It’s not all blood and hunger. Think of the daisies in June; think of the bleating of a newborn calf on stumbling legs; think of laughter and friends…”

For the first time since his transformation, Rose saw the muscles in Trevor’s limbs soften. Hope sprung in her chest.

Then there was a rumble of thunder over the mountains, and the wind changed. Perhaps a corpse fly had flapped its wings in some far-off land or a child coughed with the first sign of plague or a master’s whip cracked one time too many or perhaps two atoms had merely collided at the beginning of all things, but somehow beyond all human knowledge chaos had its way.

The beast appeared to taste the shifted air, then stared straight toward the spot where Bluehand was crouched. It took two labored steps forward with a roar then shot faster than the eye could see towards them.

It was suddenly on top of Bluehand, and the two grappled on the ground. Blood flowed from a shallow gash across Bluehand’s chest, but it was clear his skin had some protection from the wicked claws and teeth. Rose desperately beat at the thing with her small fists, trying to help, but one flick of its arm and she was thrown back into the sandy canyon floor.

Bluehand was losing ground. The claws were whirling faster and faster, and his blood was now flowing freely from multiple cuts. His knife was hopelessly pinned beneath him, but he held the tuning fork out like a crucifix, and Trevor roared in agony. From the ground, Rose tried to match the note with her voice. The beast appeared held in stasis for less than a millisecond, and then Willow was there, pulling the silver necklace in a garotte across its throat as the jaws continued to snap.

“Kill it…” she struggled through clenched teeth and tears.

His arm now free, Bluehand raised the knife and plunged its point into the monster’s eye. Bright silvery cracks spread from the penetration across its hideous head and down into the rest of its body. There was a flash as Trevor burst into pieces, and in the darkness that followed the knife fell quietly to the ground.

Rose struggled to her feet and went to pick up the tuning fork now lying in the sand beside the exhausted Bluehand. In her hand, she was surprised to feel it pulling like a dowsing rod toward the distant thundering mountain. She looked back in the direction where their town was nestled, then stared out toward the dark peak. Silhouetted in a flash of lightning behind the clouds for just a second, she thought she could make out a murky five-pointed shape.


End file.
